Question about short-term home schooling/travel while in public school
Hello - Wondering if there are parents who have pulled their child out of public school for 1 or 2 semesters so you can travel/homeschool while traveling, and can you share the process you went through to do that? I'm assuming this can only be done in a school system where you can return b/c attendance is based on residency (and not on lottery). What kind of red tape did you have to go through, how did the school respond, did the teachers give you coursework to take with you, how did your child reaclimate to returning to school? Thank you very much for your insights!
Sep 22, 2018
Parent Replies
There are lots of families who homeschool kids for periods of time between traditional public schooling for a variety of reasons. The simplest legal way to go if you're traveling is to withdraw your child from their school, file a private school affidavit with the state, and homeschool for whatever period of time you'd like. A few public schools can offer independent study programs so you don't need to withdraw, and there are many charter schools with independent study programs that provide some level of support for homeschooling (Valley View, Connecting Waters, Hickman, etc.). Most of these have an application process and / or lottery, require periodic meetings with teachers, and have some testing requirement, so they may not work with your travel schedule. We homeschooled my son for 2 years through a charter, and this year he returned to public school with no problems whatsoever. We traveled but were never away for more than a few weeks, so the charter school worked fine. There are also lots of great online classes you can do from anywhere with internet. We've used Beast Academy / AoPS, OnlineG3 and Athena's Academy. Good luck!
We’re year-round homeschoolers so I can’t speak to the public school piece of your question, but you might check out the Worldschoolers group on Facebook. There’s a wide range of traveling families there.
If you live in Berkeley there is an independent studies form to fill out. Ask at your school office.